The paper discusses rationality at two levels. According to a common opinion the key to rationality at the group level is a willingness to contribute unselfishly at the individual level. I claim that even when rationality at the individual level is denied, it is often achieved by social punishment. The difficulty to organize a social project is exaggerated. The relative ease of implementing ind...

C RITICAL DISCUSSIONS of the ideas of the philosopher/novelist Ayn Rand are often most interesting, especially in what they say about the critic and about Rand's relation to today's philosophical orthodoxy. In "Life and the Theory of Value," J. Charles King continues the criticism of Rand's ethics undertaken by Robert Nozick in his article, "On the Randian Argument."' Nozick's critique was exam...

Though you stand on the top of the ladder of life, youmust not kick out that ladder from under your feet. You must not deny your relatives, the other animals. Their history is your history, and if you kick them to the bottom of the abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go yourself. By them you stand or fall. What you repudiate in them you repudiate in yourself — a pretty spectacle, truly, of an...

Geiger-counter apparatus in which several counters may be placed in any position relative to each other is described. A circular arrangement of counters to give a counting rate approximately independent of the position of a so urce near the center of the circle is discussed. The relation of the I osition of the source to the counting rate of a single Geiger counter is discus ed. A method of cal...

Based on the self-licensing literature and goal theory, we expected and found that completed (im)moral actions lead to markedly different food choices (Studies 1 & 2) than intended (im)moral actions (Study 2). In Study 1, people more often chose healthy over unhealthy food options when they recalled a completed egoistic action than when they recalled a completed altruistic action. Study 2 confi...

Through the modeling of ecosystems, evolutionary game theory brings such diverse fields as biology, ecology, economics and sociology under the umbrella of mathematical sciences [1, 2, 3]. One central objective of evolutionary game theory is to understand the workings of cooperative behavior among the individuals in an ecosystem. Since the publication of the work by Axelrot on the prisoner’s dil...

Egocentrism has always been viewed as profoundly unethical, and thus a reason against ethical egoism. This paper examines the arguments for such claims and finds them somewhat wanting. It then considers the positions that egocentrism is psychologically untenable and that it is philosophically unstable. Though it appears true that egocentrism is a psychologically unappealing position for many, i...

In this article, the important but neglected link between workplace safety-enhancing behavior and ethics is explored. Using data from 237 employees from five manufacturing plants in the Midwest, we investigated how specific local ethical climate types are linked to incidences of injuries and two types of safety-enhancing behaviors: safety compliance and safety participation. It was hypothesized...

Discussions within normative ethics would be facilitated by a classification that treat actions and moral norms within the same functional framework. Based on evolutionary biology, we distinguish five categories of action. Four of these selfishness, kin selection, group egoism, and reciprocity benefit the individual's genetic interest and may be described as "broad self-interest", but not so al...

The data related in this paper are related to "Environmental-behavior studies of sustainable construction of the third place - based on outdoor environment-behavior cross-feed symbiotic analysis and verification of selective activities" (Ren, 2017) [1]. The dataset was from a field sub-time extended investigation to children of Hohhot West Inner Mongolia Electric Power Community Residential Are...